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Read and concatenate State files of ACS data

Source: R/read.concat.states.R
read.concat.states.Rd

Read the unzipped csv files of estimates and MOE (margin of error) for American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year summary file data obtained from US Census FTP site. These State-specific csv files are combined into a single national result for each Census data table.

Usage

read.concat.states(
  tables,
  mystates,
  geo,
  needed,
  folder = getwd(),
  output.path,
  end.year = acsdefaultendyearhere_func(),
  save.files = TRUE,
  sumlevel = "both",
  testing = FALSE,
  dt = TRUE,
  silent = FALSE
)

Arguments

tables

Optional character vector of table numbers needed such as 'B01001', but default is all tables from each sequence file found.

mystates

Optional character vector of 2-character state abbreviations. Default is all states for which matching filenames are found in folder.

geo

Optional table of geographic identifiers that elsewhere would be merged with data here. If provided, it is used here to look up data file length, based on state abbrev's list. See get.read.geo() If geo is not provided, the function still reads each file whatever its length.

needed

Optional data.frame specifying which variables to keep from each table. Default is to keep all. See set.needed() and get.acs()

folder

Default is current working directory. Specifies where the csv files are to be found.

output.path

Default is whatever the parameter folder is set to. Results as .RData files are saved here if save.files=TRUE.

end.year

Optional, specifies end year of 5-year summary file.

save.files

Default is TRUE, in which case it saves each resulting table/ data file on disk.

sumlevel

Default is "both". Specifies if "tracts" or "blockgroups" or "both" should be returned.

testing

Default is FALSE. If TRUE, prints filenames but does not unzip them, and prints more messages.

dt

Optional logical, TRUE by default, specifies whether data.table::fread should be used instead of read.csv

silent

Default is FALSE. Whether to send progress info to standard output.

Value

Returns a list of data.frames, where each element of the list is one ACS table, such as table B01001.

Details

This can use read.csv (takes about 1 minute total for one table, all states, est and moe). It can use data.table::fread (default method), which is faster.

See also

get.acs()